[ragequittah]

I always wonder if anyone out there thinks they're not making money off of other people's work. If you're coding, writing a fantasy novel, taking a photograph or drawing a picture from first principals you came up with yourself I applaud you though.

[taikahessu]

You are absolutely right.

Seriously though, I do think that is the case. It would be self-righteous to argue otherwise. It's just the scale and the nature of this, that makes it so repulsive. For my taste, copying something without permission, is stealing. I don't care what a judge somewhere thinks of it. Using someone's good will for profit is disgusting. And I hope we all get to profit from it someday, not just a select few. But that is just my opinion.

[IcyWindows]

This kind of thinking seems like a road for people to have to pay a license for the rest of their life after going to school for the knowledge they "stole" from their textbooks.

[taikahessu]

Except the school paid royalties for that specific book. Every book. The money was distributed. Writers, publishers and so on. The normal stuff.

Or if you had to buy the book yourself, same thing, distributed, royalties paid.

[IcyWindows]

So your complaint is that they didn't pay for training data by buying every book found online?

That does seem more reasonable, but makes public libraries also evil.

[taikahessu]

Except the libraries pay the fees of the books, they only serve a dedicated local region of people and by loaning a book, you will know the author of the book.

For LLMs the transformative part is then removing the copyright info and serving it to you as OpenAI whatever.

Sure, you can query multiple books at the same time and the technology is godlike. But the underlying issue remains. Without the original content, the LLM is useless. Someone took all the books, feed them in and didn't pay anything back to the authors.

I'm not sure whether arguing in good faith here. This information you could easily check for yourself too. The problem is not the information itself. It's the massive machinery that steals all the works and one day we are staring at the paywall. And the artists are still not funded. I'd rather just do something nice offline in the future.

[IcyWindows]

I'm talking about the knowledge people "steal" by reading. LLMs and humans both absorb knowledge by reading. You want to tax using that knowledge that was absorbed.

It will be applied to people soon after.

[ragequittah]

I understand but I think this will be quite a quaint idea soon in all honesty. Imagine these things are able to progress the world of science, math, physics, and whatever else (they already are) and we stopped them because someone didn't make enough royalties first. That to me would be more repulsive. We stop/slow the progress of all humanity because there wasn't enough temporary gain for x individual who wrote y book. And if it all turns out to be bogus nonsense then I doubt x individual who wrote y book loses much in the process anyway.

[taikahessu]

Yeah, it's not an easy puzzle piece. How far are we going to go in the name of science and progress again? Are you buying it, that it's all for the greater good? Quite a lot of money involved here. Everyone wants a piece of it. But I digress. Dropping the big bomb, stealing the lands and riches of the natives, using slaves and colonies to power the whole civilization into a new era might be powerful and efficient. But it doesn't make it right. I don't buy the narrative. Do no evil until you can no longer say no?

[ragequittah]

I think comparing intellectual property theft to slavery and stealing land is where I start leaning towards the argument being absurd. The stolen books are still on store shelves. People are likely still buying them at about the same rate as before.

And as far as it being for the greater good that seems to be the promise of many of these companies. What will inevitably get in the way is greed and money, the very same reasons we're arguing about IP theft. Good or bad I see no way out of this but through at this point.